Gonna keep track of my progress here (🔄 = in progress). Unless otherwise noted, I’ll be opting to read rather than listen to audiobooks.

1. A. Einstein’s Why Socialism? ☑
2. R. Day’s Why Marxism? ☑
3. M. Parenti’s “Yellow Parenti” Speech ☑ (I’ve watched it before but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to watch some Parenti!)
4. M. Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds 🔄

mfw I can’t even read the introduction to the post where you clearly explain that it’s reading time and not listening time

Chat, am I cooked?

In all seriousness, I think I ought to read these rather than listen to them, anyway. I enjoy listening to audiobooks as a way to keep my mind occupied while I’m doing other tasks and learn things while I’m at it, but my retention of them is terrible. It’s fine if I’m just listening for pure pleasure or to get a general sense of familiarity, but if I actually want to internalize the information to improve my understanding of socialism that ain’t gonna cut it. I’ve heard that Blackshirts and Reds is quite digestible, and I didn’t realize it was so short, so it seems like a natural place to start.

If I really stick with getting through this, maybe I’ll have trained my long-atrophied reading muscle enough to actually keep up with the Capital reading group next year (I washed out on week 2…forgive me, sensei). For what it’s worth, I did find the tiny morsel of Capital that I made it through really interesting and enlightening by itself, so I can only imagine what it’ll be like to read a whole volume!

Think you’ve got a typo there on the duration of the Blackshirts and Reds audiobook—should be 5 hr 29 min. I only wish the audiobook could have been read by Parenti with his beautiful Eyetalian accent and righteous anger But nevertheless, I shall read it!

Thanks for your hard work in creating and refining this list. Seeing it all laid out makes it a lot more manageable, since there’s such an incredible volume of literature out there that even deciding what to read can be overwhelming to the point that it becomes a barrier to actually reading anything.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/1999/aug/24/spaceexploration

The late astronomer and author Carl Sagan was a secret but avid marijuana smoker, crediting it with inspiring essays and scientific insight, according to Sagan’s biographer.

Using the pseudonym ‘Mr. X’, Sagan wrote about his pot smoking in an essay published in the 1971 book Reconsidering Marijuana. The book’s editor, Lester Grinspoon, recently disclosed the secret to Sagan’s biographer, Keay Davidson.

Davidson, a writer for the San Francisco Examiner, revealed the marijuana use in an article published in the newspaper’s magazine Sunday. Carl Sagan: A Life is due out in October.

“I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high… in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theatre,” wrote Sagan, who authored popular science books such as Cosmos, Contact, and The Dragons of Eden.

In the essay, Sagan said marijuana inspired some of his intellectual work.

“I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves,” wrote the former Cornell University professor. “I wrote the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down.”

Sagan also wrote that pot enhanced his experience of food, particularly potatoes, as well as music and sex.

Grinspoon, Sagan’s closest friend for 30 years, said Sagan’s marijuana use is evidence against the notion that marijuana makes people less ambitious.

“He was certainly highly motivated to work, to contribute,” said Grinspoon, a psychiatry professor at Harvard University.

Grinspoon is an advocate of decriminalizing marijuana.

Ann Druyan, Sagan’s former wife, is a director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. The nonprofit group promotes legalization of marijuana.

Sagan died of pneumonia in 1996. He was 62.

Pretty wild that some random undergrad got an interview with Gabe Newell.

Interview excerpt (edited for clarity, emphasis mine):

People don’t buy businesses, right? They buy value that you create for them, right? And a lot of—you shouldn’t ever think of yourself as, “I’m going into a business.” You should think, "This is the value that I’m going to create for customers. And you know, that’s the thing that you need to be really focused on is: what is the value that you’re creating for customers? Why is the value you’re creating for those customers different than the value that other people are offering them and how you can increase the value of that? Focusing on your customers and how to be valuable to them to the exclusion of almost everything else is a really good approach, right?

I see a lot of people go into situations thinking that what they need is a pitch document to VCs to raise capital and that’s a deeply distracted beginning to an organization. If you’re creating value for people, the capital will come your way and probably at a reduced cost than it would be otherwise. Having a big bunch of capital and then saying, “Oh, I guess all those lies we told in our pitch deck but now we have to go and hire a whole bunch of people to be on this trajectory,” I think that that you know that’s a great way of destroying a bunch of money and wasting a bunch of people’s time.

So, I think the key is to ignore all of the the distractions around it and just focus on, “How do we make our customers happier?”, right? If you listen to your customers and focus on them, it’s ridiculously easier to to build a business, but the focus should always be on your customers and on your partners and on your employees, and then everything else will fall into place over time.

Almost all discussions about branding that I ever hear nowadays are like, “Oh my god, you are so deeply distracted and confused about what you’re trying to do here.” Most of what goes on in the business press targeting small companies is the exact opposite of what people—the spotlight is in the wrong place. It’s like, “Who are your customers?” “What do they care about?” “Why would they care about this more than this?” Those are the questions that people should be asking themselves. Until you can sort of read your customers minds and are continuously willing to be surprised by your customers, all the other stuff is is really a distraction.

Gunrun: (brief summary if you don’t know what a VShojo is)

Archive link for said article:

https://archive.is/20250719140739/https://puck.news/was-colberts-cancellation-really-economic-for-cbs/

Also (emphasis mine):

Colbert, who initially struggled on CBS before rising to first place after he positioned Late Show as a key voice of the Trump 1.0 resistance, regularly attacks the president and often hosts fire-breathing left-wing guests like Sen. Adam Schiff and the Pod Save America guys

lol. lmao even

Archive link

THEY’RE COMING FOR YOU NEXT YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKERS. AAAAAAAAAAAGH

Don’t forget the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism

I realize I’m probably in the minority here, but I infinitely preferred blue books over take-home essays. I love learning so I would usually fully engage with lectures and readings, but given two weeks and a blank document my ADHD and perfectionism would drive me up the wall and I’d often take a fat zero on the assignment. On the other hand, if you just shoved a blue book in my face and told me to write a few short essays in two hours, I’d make it happen somehow and then I could walk out of the exam having only endured a few hours of moderate stress instead of weeks of torturing myself.

From 2008 to 2011, Li made CRACK99 a reliable black-market marketplace, one that netted an estimated $100 million in sales. His inventory, investigators later said, was valued at over $1 billion.

Since it’s not clear from this write-up, those eye-popping figures (the ones concocted by the Department of Justice) are derived from the prices that the licenses were being sold for by the original companies, so it’s not $100 million in sales but $100 million in “value” (the idea of calculating a $1 billion valuation for the digital “inventory” is even more ridiculous). If you look on the actual crack99 website, you’ll see that most of the cracked software was being sold for anywhere from twenty bucks to maybe a few hundred dollars—this guy was not making millions from this. The government’s sentencing memorandum has the details; this includes the absurd figure of $3,812,241.57 for a single software license of some CAD software called “Catia VR520”, which Li sold to at least one other customer for the princely sum of $100.

Shoutout to my dumbass relatives for sending their DNA to this company—thanks for nothing!

TIL that the Holy Hand Grenade from Monty Python and the Holy Grail was based on a real item from the British Coronation regalia

Oh yeah, it’s brain drain time.

Thank you for sharing–that was a really neat demonstration, and I enjoyed seeing all the troubleshooting as well. Will definitely be subscribing and checking out more of their videos!

Thank you for sharing and for translating! As someone who remembers the wall-to-wall bloodthirsty coverage of 9/11 and the ensuing war on American TV, I was really shocked to see such a frank assessment of the situation in the immediate aftermath of the attack. I mean, I know intellectually that there was global grassroots opposition to the war, but it’s not something I was exposed to much except through the filter of the jingoistic media, and certainly not at length like this. Would you say that this was more or less in line with how the Norwegian media approached 9/11 and the nascent War on Terror at the time?

No worries! Idk anything about Webtoons but I’m guessing the canvas version is sorta like a web novel and then the newer one is like when a web novel gets picked up, polished, and published as a light novel? I’ll just go for the newer one

Ty for the recs! For Winter Before Spring, which version should I read? Seems like there’s an earlier, finished version and a newer, ongoing version

This is Breezewood, PA, for anyone who wants to see for themselves: an absolute asphalt-ridden hellscape of which tens of thousands are strewn about this godforsaken country.

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/31554110/nfl-halt-race-norming-review-black-claims-1-billion-concussion-settlement

The binary race norms, when they are used in the testing, assumes that Black patients start with worse cognitive function than whites and other non-Blacks. That makes it harder for them to show a deficit and qualify for an award.

what the actual fuck